Many companies provide public and private cloud services. Such companies include Rackspace®, Google®, Amazon®, Microsoft Azure®, and the like. Enterprises such as financial institutions, banks, law firms, manufacturers, and the like may wish to lease datacenter resources from cloud providers. The cloud infrastructure providers allow the enterprises to run their computing equipment within the cloud infrastructure provider facility. This is commonly called a hosted data center solution.
In many cases, the hosted or cloud data center consists of virtualized compute, storage, and network resources. In order to create desired functionality in a virtualized environment, it is often required that software functionality be transferred, installed, managed, and operated in the form of a virtual machine (VM). Virtual machines are files that contain operating system, software, and data, and are the virtual equivalent of a physical compute resource implementing an application or function. Companies are increasingly using the virtual machine format as a way to commercialize their technology, and products embodied as virtual machines are essential large (typically one gigabyte or more) data files (content) that are licensed for use by an end user. Unfortunately, since these virtual machines can be quite large, the distribution of these files from producers to consumers can be difficult, time consuming, and expensive. Inability to rapidly distribute virtual machines also impairs the ability to consume or use the virtual machine, especially for short time duration uses.
Thus, improved apparatuses and methods for provisioning computing resources are desired.